I wake up at around 7:30 in the morning and around 8:20 I walk to the bus stop where one of the teachers picks me up. I love riding to school with this teacher because she is so nice! She also is the Galician Language teacher, so she obviously knows a lot about the language, literature and history. We listen to the radio in Galician. I would like to stay in Galicia for at least 2 years and I think by the time I will be conversational in both Gallego and Portuguese.
I am with the older kids on Friday, so my co teacher sends 3 or 4 students to practice speaking English with me. After doing this for 8 days I think I could have a conversation with a rock. Trying to get shy 12-16 year olds to speak English and answer my questions isn't the easiest activity. Because my contract is for around 13.5 hours a week I have many breaks during the day, so I go to a local cafe. The owners are very nice and wanted me to give them English lessons, but their time preference does not fit into my schedule, so I just speak English with them whenever they aren't super busy. I teach in a town where the primary language is Gallego, so I am constantly surrounded by the beautiful rhythmic language.
At 2, I go to the dining hall to help with lunch. I bring food to the kids as well as tell them to eat more and cut the food if necessary. The kids are so funny and always tell me about the 6-10 year old gossip. I then eat with the other teachers at around 2:45.
One of the teachers at my school asked me if I could teach his son English, so every Friday I will go there and teach a group lesson with the boy and some of his other 11 year old friends.The mom is from Senegal and she was preparing a dinner, because they have a group of friends who have a big dinner together every month or so. She invited me and of course I said I would go! When I arrived they gave me a Senagalese style dress. We ate some kind of delicious meat, rice and yuca, while we drank Galician beer, Portuguese wine, Irish coffee and gin and tonic, so by 2 a.m., when everyone was leaving I was set for the night. I had plans to meet my friends near the port to have a drink and then go to the discoteca. The family I was eating with also have a 23 year old son, so he went with me to help find my friends, but he ended up staying with us until 6 a.m., obviously because my friends who have become my family are amazing :)))
We left the discoteca at 5 a.m. and usually I walk the 35 minutes back to my apartment, because it is very safe and there are so many people out and about, but my friend was wearing heels so we decided to take the bus. We waited for over an hour because the bus we wanted to take never came, so we took the longer route. When we were finally on the bus, I was ignoring someone who was speaking to me in incoherent English. I absolutely hate it when people I do not know speak English to me out of nowhere, because by this time I am almost completely fluent in Spanish and it makes me feel uncomfortable when I'm singled out like that. As it turns out the poor kid wasn't crazy he just had too much to drink and thought that he was in London (because they had just arrived to Vigo after a trip to London) his girlfriend apologized to me and then we became friends with everyone else on the bus, because it was around a 20 minutes ride. I had a drink with both of them today and had a fantastic time. Friends you make on the 6 a.m. bus are friends for life.
No comments:
Post a Comment